New Music: Common Has a New Album and Audra MacDonald as ‘Lady Day’

Common takes a hard look at his hometown on his 10th album, “Nobody’s Smiling.” The place is Chicago, and the news is far from good. On the title track, rapping against an ominous hum of trap synths, he wastes little breath before setting the scene of a skirmish with the police, or other opposition:

Where the chief and the president come from

Pop out, pop pills, pop guns

On the deck when the ops come

Pop some

Ops run

Moving on, Common apprises the pull of cold currency and the desperate actions taken to pursue it. In passing, he issues a dedication to Hadiya Pendleton, the Chicago teenager whose murder last year — one week after she had performed with her high school majorette team at a presidential inauguration — came to symbolize her city’s woes. The track also features a vivid spoken-word poem by Malik Yusef, but by then Common has made his point, complete and intact, accruing gravity by the phrase.

Common is 42, and he has warmed to his place within hip-hop: no longer an up-and-comer, not yet an elder, but something like a righteous older brother. A good many of the boasts on this album have to do with lineage (“Open shows at the Regal for Daddy Kane and Eazy-E, though”) or longevity (“Pinot noir star, better with time”). He made a concerted effort to reserve some guest spots for hungry rappers in their early 20s, like Lil Herb and Dreezy, both from Chicago, and Vince Staples, from Long Beach, Calif.

Produced by No I.D., a longtime Common associate who also handled his solid previous album, “Nobody’s Smiling” is meant as a street polemic, a tangle of problems with no clear solutions. The rapping is muscular, self-assured and occasionally even startling, as in the offbeat accents during a stretch of “Hustle Harder.”

Which makes the missteps all the more vexing, none more so than “Diamonds,” with a hook and verse by Big Sean and a premise already picked clean by Kanye West. “Speak My Piece,” built over a scrap of a Notorious B.I.G. tune, feels like a freestyle invention, charmingly loose but better suited to a mixtape. “Rewind That” elegizes the producer J Dilla, a touching idea that Common and others have put into practice before. And “Real” offers no new twist on the subject of realness, managing only to impart an odd note of lushness courtesy of the singer Elijah Blake and the Gap Band, whose quiet-storm ballad “Yearning for Your Love” provides the sample at the song’s core.

Far better are the moments when Common tackles the subject at hand, in imaginative terms but concrete detail. “The Neighborhood,” which opens the album, clears this bar, as do “No Fear” and the title track. And “Kingdom” is a ruthless aria of cyclical violence, with gospel underpinnings that can’t help but call Mr. West’s “Jesus Walks” to mind.

Never mind the evocation. “Kingdom” opens with a funeral service and fleshes out, in the first person, a path to vengeance, incarceration and mortal consequences. Mr. Staples turns in a fine verse, terse and on point. As for Common, he lays out the story in a way that makes clear his empathy as well as his judgment. When he raps “These streets is my religion,” you hear the bluster — and behind it, a mournful critique. NATE CHINEN

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AUDRA MCDONALD

‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill’ (PS Classics)

When it was announced that Audra McDonald, one of the world’s great dramatic sopranos, would portray Billie Holiday on Broadway in a revival of Lanie Robertson’s play “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” who would have imagined that Ms. McDonald would stretch her phenomenal talent as far as she does, sacrificing vocal beauty for authenticity?

But onstage and in this two-disc cast album, Ms. McDonald “becomes” Holiday in much the same way that Meryl Streep “became” Margaret Thatcher in the film “The Iron Lady” or Julia Child in the film “Julie & Julia.” The play is set in a South Philadelphia bar in March 1959, about a year after Holiday’s mesmerizing penultimate album, “Lady in Satin,” with the bandleader Ray Ellis conducting a string orchestra augmented by leading jazz musicians.

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Ms. McDonald eerily captures Holiday’s ravaged vocal sound on “Lady in Satin,” accompanied by a trio (Shelton Becton on piano, George Farmer on bass and Clayton Craddock on drums). Holiday’s signature songs, some complete, others fragmentary, are interwoven with monologues in which Holiday — increasingly inebriated and, after intermission, drug-addled — reflects on her life and times and current troubles.

The cast album is a complete performance of the show, recorded live at Circle in the Square Theater. Like so many one-person shows that blend songs and reminiscences into a biographical portrait, the play is an uncomfortable forced marriage of drama and music. The Holiday monologues present a shallow, clichéd portrait of the singer, who died at 44 in 1959, as a tragic victim.

But Ms. McDonald’s astonishing performance, both as an actor and singer, is something else. She may not swing quite as naturally as Holiday in an upbeat number like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” but she still swings more confidently than you ever thought possible. The performances — especially of “God Bless the Child” and “Strange Fruit” — have an eerie intensity and emotional conviction that match Holiday’s but are filtered through Ms. McDonald’s more outgoing musical personality.

Her performance transcends impersonation to become — in the final number, “Deep Song” — a cry of profound loneliness and isolation and an indelible rite of spiritual communion between two great artists. STEPHEN HOLDEN

A version of this review appears in print on July 22, 2014, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: New Music: Common Has a New Album and Audra MacDonald as ‘Lady Day. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe